Satire and the Lie of Politics: El Mono (México, 1833)

Abstract

The Mexican weekly El Mono (February 1833-June 1833) was a short-lived conservative satirical newspaper that launched a sustained attack against the liberal government Valentín Gómez Farías and Antonio López de Santa Anna. Sustained by a mode of satire that it drew from a 1749 novel by Italian Counter Enlightenment satirist Zaccaria Seriman, El Mono’s editors undermined the conceptual foundations of liberal politics: popular sovereignty, public opinion and political action. Ultimately, for the editors, liberal politics responded neither to logic nor rational ideas, but to private vices. Thus, they held that the only stable grounds for society was morality, tradition and custom. In this paper, I show how this critique could only be developed through the use of Juvenalian satire. It is the immanent logic of this form of satire which structures El Mono’s critique and which, as a result of the newspapers’ popularity and effectiveness, went on to become integral to future conservative discourse in Mexico.

Publication Date

6-1-2020

Publication Title

Tiempo Histórico

Department

Hispanic Studies

Additional Department

Latin American Studies

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.25074/th.v0i20.1728

Keywords

Zavaleta Agreements, Conservatism, Satire, Valentín Gómez Farías, Antonio López de Santa Anna

Language

English

Format

text

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